Almost lost in the moving preperations is the fact that, oh yeah, I’m trying to get Narbonic, vol. 2 out the door in time for APE 2005. With only a little over two months to go, scheduling is getting a little tight.

I originally chose Dream Weaver Press as my printing service because they specialize in very small print runs at low prices (with a slighty less professional print quality). But after building the book in QuarkXPress, I discovered they no longer accept Quark files. Gah!

So I went hunting. Of the “standard” comic printing companies, only Brenner allows runs smaller than 1000. Their quote came in at $8/book, twice the printing cost of Narbonic, vol. 1. No thanks.

Back to Dream Weaver. The challenge now is to turn my Quark files with embedded TIFF images into a PDF without loss of image quality. I think I’ve found the right settings in Quark and Adobe Distiller to do the job by converting each page into an EPS file first, but I won’t really know until I see it printed, unfortunately.

Meanwhile, check out my designs for the front and back covers.

I’m starting to get antsy to leave, but I still have a lot to do here.

Kelly the Fish — the sole survivor of the original quartet of Kenny, Kelly, Kerry, and Steve — can’t make the trip, so today I put her in a bucket and took her back to Arizona Animals & Supplies and asked, “Wanna adopt a fish?” Turns out the owner has a tank full of adopted cichlids. In the tank she went, immediately staking out some territory under a stack of rocks.

I’m still in the process of cleaning out my tank. I’m not a very good fish keeper and might not try it again, but I’m taking the tank with me, just in case.

I also have to decide what to do with 1500 useless copies of The Way of the Wolf #1 (recycle? make a bonfire? mail them all to the artist who disappeared on me after 28 pages?) and a decade’s worth of equally-useless Computer Gaming World magazines. I should just recycle them, but that feels like tossing out a large chunk of my old life.

Which may not be a bad thing, come to think of it.

Spamusement: often-hilarious one-panel cartoons based on spam subject lines.

You know, an extra 1-4 inches does make a massive difference…

The first week of January went something like this: Monday, called my realtor. Tuesday, met with my realtor. Wednesday, was nearly crushed by stampede of prospective home buyers. Thursday, sold my house. My townhouse was on the market for all of 24 whirlwind hours before I accepted one of three offers above the listing price.

When I bought this place in August 2002, it had been empty and on the market for quite a while, I had plenty of time to think it over, and I closed at $86,000, below the listing price. I just sold it for $102,000. The housing market is insanely overvalued right now. It’s apparently a great time to be a seller. In fact, I regret not adding another five grand to the listing price. I could’ve gotten it easily.

On top of the unexpectedly high price for my house, I just discovered I’m going to get four extra paychecks when our new overlords buy out our accrued PTO time. Moving can’t be a bad decision when the universe keeps throwing piles of money at my feet for doing so.

Tomorrow morning I meet with the realtors and the new owners to sign the final paperwork. On February 1, I rejoin the ranks of the renters. As per the closing agreement, I’m staying in the house through the end of February and paying them rent.

I don’t have a place in Seattle yet. My brother Jim wants to move there and share a place, but his health and financial situations are slightly up in the air. I had another possible offer from a friend of a co-worker, but his current, flaky roommate situation makes it impossible to plan anything concrete. At the moment it looks like I’ll room with Jim.

My tenative schedule:

My last day at work will be February 25. By the 27th I’ll pile my non-essential belongings into storage. Then I start the leisurely Barklage West Coast Tour 2005: see the Grand Canyon for the first time ever, stop in Vegas, maybe see friends in LA and SF, then head through Portland to Seattle. I’ll stay at Maria and Tom’s house, first getting the key from a neighbor’s house because they’ll be in Florida. From there, I’ll take my laptop to Ballard/Fremont/Queen Anne coffeeshops with wireless access and begin searching for an apartment.

(This is starting to sound like an adventure game walkthrough: “To get the key from the neighbor, you must first combine the syrup with the cat hair to make a false moustache…”)

Once I find a place, which hopefully won’t take too long, I’ll take a one-way Southwest flight back to Tucson, load up a U-Haul, and start driving… again. This time I’ll head up through Denver to add Jim’s stuff to the truck, then cross the Rockies, probably just in time for the requisite Colorado mid-March blizzard. We’ll see.

The secret, life-changing news I’ve alluded to all month is more-or-less public knowledge at work, so I can finally share it here. Anyone who knows me well won’t be surprised, since I’ve been talking about it for months now, but a few people at work read this blog and there were reasons to keep it quiet for a while.

I’m moving to Seattle. Land of coffeeshops, Fraiser, and Microsoft.

I’d been considering such a move for almost a year now, but gave myself until New Year’s to make up my mind. On January 3, the first Monday of 2005, I gave my boss a couple of months’ notice, and the wheels of change began to turn.

Why Seattle? Suffice to say, I’m not happy in Tucson.

Socially, my life hasn’t been good for quite a while. I hang out with fewer people now than I did when I first moved here, which seems weird. Every desirable woman my age has kids, a husband, and/or some sort of unpleasant emotional problems. I’m almost 30, and I have nothing to show for it but a mortgage and a decent drinking habit. (If nothing else, I can take heart that my life seems to parallel Christopher Moore’s.)

Politically, well… I’ve been surrounded by midwestern, militaristic, redneck values my entire life: the Redneck Riviera of Florida; military bases in Germany; Colorado; Arizona. I’m desperate to get away from that, to live someplace that values education, secularism, diversity, and conservation. I want to live close to the ocean, someplace I might be able to walk to shops instead of having to drive everywhere. I have family in Seattle, so it fits the bill.

(After the election I considered Vancouver, BC, but the one-year wait for legal entry into Canada put the kibosh on that.)

The first thing everyone asks when I tell them the news is, “Do you have a job lined up?” And the answer is, no I don’t. Happily, gloriously, I have absolutely NO job waiting for me. I have a year’s salary saved up and I’ll live off of that while I enjoy myself.

Understand: I don’t hate my current job, I’m just burned out on it. I come into work, stare at code for nine hours, then go home and get online again… that’s it. My co-workers are good people, but as far as I know I’m the ONLY unmarried person there. It’s just a different world than the one I wanted. Eventually I might miss the salary and the windowed office and the salary and the stability and, oh yeah, the salary, but I need to knock it all down and start over.

My Plan: Finish my novel. Write a few other stories and articles, maybe sell one. Take a part time job or a series of odd jobs to reconnect myself to humanity. Add some freelance web work, if I can. Try to take up a social hobby or two. Eventually, depending on my situation, get a full-time development job again. The way I figure, with my skill set, the money will be there when I want it. I just have to find it.

The second thing everyone mentions, inevitably, is “Seattle? But it rains ALL THE TIME.” Right. It’s rainy and miserable and everyone hates it, which is why property values are so high and three million people live there. Besides, after five years in Tucson, I’ve developed a healthy hatred for the sun. It never goes away. By July, I’m glaring at the damn thing, pondering ways to blow it up. I’ve never liked the desert and its cacti, snakes and scorpions. Maybe I’ll get equally sick of temperate rainforests, but for now it’ll be a lovely change of pace.

Now that I’ve explained the whys, I’ll save the hows for the next entry.

Sign the petition!

(This comes out of a conversation I had on Ted A’Zary’s TV forum.)

What is there to say about The Stupidest Angel? It’s Christopher Moore, so you know what you’re getting into. It’s funny, even for Moore. Storywise, it’s not one of his stronger books, but it’s not supposed to be; it’s just a short, silly zombies-at-Christmas tale.

At his signing, he mentioned that he thought the turned out too long, and I can see his point. The zombies didn’t even show up until the 2/3 point, following a couple of plot threads that just sort of meandered then politely disappeared. Maybe it could’ve been tightened up. But it made me laugh out loud — repeatedly — so all is forgiven.

As if there was any doubt, Seymour Hersh sets us straight. I’m hoping it’s not true, but I can’t remember Hersh ever being wrong before. The Pentagon issued its standard non-denial denial.

I’m not even going to bother protesting this new war. What’s the point? No one will listen, again. I just hope when the draft returns, it takes the Republicans first.

Battlestar Galactica debuts tomorrow night (Friday) on Sci-Fi Channel. I don’t get Sci-Fi, so I’ve been downloading episodes broadcast on Britain’s Sky Channel, which co-financed the series. And it’s… really, surprisingly good.

That’s quite a revelation for someone who mocked the very idea of a Battlestar revival for the years that it took to become reality. But the cheesy 70s Mormon allegory/kiddie show has been completely reworked into a grim, fascinating 9/11 allegory. The end result is equal parts Wing Commander (the game, not the horrible movie) and Blade Runner.

Starbuck is female now. So is Boomer, but she’s also a Cylon sleeper agent who doesn’t know she isn’t human. The President is a former teacher thrust into the role by a long chain of succession; she keeps a running tally of the number of humans left alive. I still don’t know whether the traitorous Dr. Baltar is schizophrenic or the Cylons really communicate with him. Another interesting dynamic: all the good guys are secular pagans, while the bad guys are fundamentalist monotheists worshipping an as-yet-unexplained God.

When the series is working on all cylinders, an air of hopeless, paranoid gloom hangs over it. I know that sounds less than fun, but trust me, give it a shot.

Peter Watts’s Starfish concerns the crew of a power station at the bottom of a deep sea rift. Any sane human who undergoes the body re-engineering process and lives at that depth for any length of time goes crazy, so the only people who are right for the job are already mentally damaged.

The first half of the book is a series of fascinating character sketches in search of a plot: a withdrawn abuse victim, a pedophile, a violent bully, and the equally-damaged-in-his-own-way psychologist sent to check up on them. The narrative is present-tense third-person, but Watts makes generous use of italicized inner thoughts to create characters whose mental processes are completely alien but totally believable.

The book almost feels like it loses its way when the plot finally shows up, revolving around an undersea virus that could threaten the mainland. Starfish is the first in a trilogy, so I’m sure some of it sets up later novels, but I’m undecided whether I’ll pursue them. (Especially with so many other books and writing styles already in the queue.)